Allyn King

Allyn S. King (February 1, 1899 – March 31, 1930) was an American actress, singer, and stage performer whose career spanned vaudeville, the Ziegfeld Follies, Broadway, and silent film. Born in North Carolina to Allen S. and Phoebe (née Whitaker) King, she spent her early childhood in Winston, now Winston-Salem, where her father was completing his medical studies. After earning his degree in the early 1900s, Allen King returned to his home state of Louisiana and established a medical practice in Morgan City. On May 19, 1909, a sixteen-year-old named Leroy Oliver entered Dr. King's office and fatally shot him, telling police that the doctor had allegedly taken advantage of his sister. Phoebe King and her two daughters, Phoebe and Allyn, were visiting relatives in North Carolina at the time of the murder. Some press accounts indicate that Allyn King later lived in Goldsboro, North Carolina, the area where her mother's family was based.

King entered show business at a young age, performing in vaudeville as a singing comedian at New York's Proctor's Twenty-Third Street Theatre by the age of fifteen. The following year she worked as a comedian and dancer with the Ziegfeld Midnight Frolic. In September 1916, she stepped in to replace headliner Justine Johnstone after Johnstone departed following a dispute with Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr. over his refusal to allow her boyfriend backstage. King remained with Ziegfeld for five seasons before transitioning to Broadway in the early 1920s.

Her Broadway career ran from 1915 to 1926 and included both plays and musicals. Among her more successful engagements, she played Alicia Bonner in the 1920 Avery Hopwood comedy Ladies' Night, which ran for 360 performances at the Eltinge Theatre on 42nd Street. In 1924 she appeared as Louise Endicott in Moonlight, a musical comedy written by William LeBaron and Con Conrad that ran for 174 performances at the Longacre Theatre. King also starred in the play Mrs. Moonlight and appeared in the musical Sun Showers (1923), the musical Florida Girl (1925), and the play 90 Horsepower (1926), the latter three productions each having short runs. In 1925 she toured in the play Seduction, a production that featured dancing harem girls.

In addition to her stage work, King appeared in at least one silent film, The Fighting Blade (1923), in which she portrayed Charlotte Musgrove, the sister of Thomsine, whose lover, Dutchman Karl Van Kerstenbrook, had traveled to England to serve in Oliver Cromwell's army.

In 1924, King was reported to be engaged to Carl Wiedemann, a wealthy brewer from Newport, Kentucky and owner of the racehorse In Memoriam. Wiedemann subsequently issued a statement denying both a marriage and an engagement.

By 1927, King's career had declined, and she nearly died after combining a near-starvation diet with diet pills in an effort to maintain the slender figure fashionable at the time. Her pursuit of an extreme low weight was driven in part by a clause in her working contract that specified precise measurements and a target weight of 115 pounds, and granted her employer the right to cancel the contract with one week's notice if her weight or any listed body measurement varied beyond narrow defined limits. She spent nearly two years recovering at a sanitarium before moving in with an aunt in New York City, where she studied music with the goal of pursuing a career in radio.

On March 29, 1930, King jumped from the fifth-story window of her aunt's New York City apartment into a courtyard below, leaving a note expressing that she believed she would never return to Broadway. She survived the fall with broken limbs and a fractured skull, and her doctors initially expressed confidence in her recovery. Though she appeared alert and in reasonable spirits, her condition worsened and she died of her injuries on March 31, 1930. Nearly 200 people attended her funeral service on April 2 at the Campbell Funeral Church on Broadway and 66th Street. A private interment followed at Mount Hope Cemetery in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, attended by her mother, sister, and close friends and family. The cemetery is now known as Westchester Hills Cemetery.